Page 99 of One Last Rainy Day
“During my dive, I read a dozen or more stories and testimonies and came across one that took place back in the eighties. It has kind of stuck with me since.”
I glance over to see her focus on me.
“It was an account from a Texas housewife who was driving a station wagon on her way to JCPenney to pick up some curtains she’d ordered. Her two young daughters were coloring in the back of it.” I search my memory for the details that stuck out. “What that housewife didn’t know asshe sped down that highway to run her everyday errand was that she would diethree timesthat day.”
Delphine’s eyes widen.
“She didn’t know that just ahead, an eighteen-wheeler had stopped on the highway due to some debris—rolls of chicken wire. He hadn’t turned on his signals or laid out traffic cones, so she didn’t slow or brake and slammed into the back of it at full speed.”
Delphine listens, rapt, her eyes drifting back to the view.
“The woman was considered medically dead three times. Twice on the way to the hospital—once while waiting for the helicopter, once in transit—and her longest flatline took place on the operating table. The medical staff wanted to call her death, but the doctor who’d been working on her refused to stop trying to bring her back—he was thinking of her two daughters being stitched up just a few rooms away. She was considered medically dead for longer than acceptable to have a decent prognosis if revived—to ever fully function again—but the doctor tried one last time and brought her back.”
The chapel fills with a misty pink hue as I relay the rest. “She had significant brain damage, had to learn to walk and talk again, read and write, but she made a full recovery.” I turn to Delphine and see she’s hanging on every word. “And do you know what her only complaint was?”
She gives a subtle shake of her head.
“That they brought her back.” I grin. “She’d seen what was waiting on the other side and didn’t want a damn thing to do with the world anymore.”
Simmering tears fill her eyes.
“She claimed that in the time she was down, she experienced enough of the afterlife that she never wanted to exist anywhereelse. That for the entirety of the time she spent there, she was enveloped in a perpetual state of love—nothing like the human love we experience, but magnified by a billion and then some. That every being there reverberates that love, and the second you brush against them or pass through them, you know every single thing about them, every detail of their lives. That the first time it happens, you become part of a collective consciousness. There’s no judgment, no shame, no suffering, regret, or pain. Nothing but an inconceivable type of feeling no human mind could ever begin to comprehend. She swore that no living soul should ever worry about the question of an afterlife.”
Delphine breaks at that moment, crying in her hands, and I whisk her to sit in the first pew, leaving a palm on her back as her body shakes with her cries.
A few beats pass before whispered apologies are amplified by the hands covering her face, and I’m just able to make them out. “Je suis désolée, je suis désolée, Dominic,” she gasps, before lifting red-rimmed eyes to mine. “Truly, sorry for the way I treated you.” Tears of regret roll down her face. “I was so horrible to you both in the beginning.”
“You can still beat it,” I tell her.
“Maybe, but this apology is long overdue,” she sniffs. “It is one of my biggest regrets.”
“You were young, heartbroken, and penniless, and don’t forget I know what got you to the place you were in. This life hasn’t given either of us very many breaks. In that we are alike.”
“You were just a little boy...you shouldn’t have had to suffer for it. I was selfish,” she admits hoarsely. “I’ve been selfish for a very long time.”
“You were, but I forgave you a while ago.”
“You did not,” she dismisses.
“Okay,” I grin. “I’ve been trying.”
“I will understand if you don’t,” she stares back at the view. “I do not deserve it.”
“Maybe...but you could have abandoned us, which could have separated us. I keep that in mind when memories of you piss me off.”
She grins. “You grew into a good man, Dominic. I do not take any credit for that. Though I should warn you again that we arevery muchalike.”
“Think so?”
“Sadly, I know so.” She turns back to take in the last of the setting sun. “Do not let your heart harden you like mine did. I’ve lost too much because I could not forgive.”
“I’ll do my best.”
We watch the last of the sun sink before we stand, and she turns to me. “Thank you for that story.”
“There are hundreds, if not thousands like it, all claiming that there’s something waiting. For every person fiercely claiming there’s a deity, there’s another hellbent on proving nothing exists. At the end of the day, both are so bloated with ego, so firm in their beliefs that neither can prove it. It’s the world’s best-kept secret, one that none of us become privy to until we become a part of it. But there’s got to be some truth to some of those stories, right?”
She nods.
